Roy Spencer’s Junk Science

Roy Spencer recently posted an article on his blog called “Ten Years After the Warming,” in which he argues that there’s no excuse for a decade without much warming, because the radiative forcing is supposedly higher than it’s ever been. Steve Milloy has also reposted the article on his aptly titled blog, JunkScience.com. (In case you don’t remember, Steve Milloy is a Fox News commentator who goes about labeling as “junk science” any environmental issues that might precipitate some government regulation. Yes, that includes links between second-hand smoke and cancer.) Spencer’s main point is this:

You cannot simply say a lack of warming in 10 years is not that unusual, and that there have been previous 10-year periods without warming, too. No, we are supposedly in uncharted territory with a maximum in radiative forcing of the climate system. One cannot compare on an equal basis the last 10 years with any previous decades without warming.

This is the same Roy Spencer who is constantly claiming that he can explain most of the warming trend over the last 100 years by appealing to various modes of natural variation in the climate, e.g., the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the El Niño Southern Oscillation. These climate oscillations depend on complicated stuff like deep ocean currents that are hard to predict, given that we don’t have that many observations of what the state of the system is like at any given time. (In other words, it’s expensive and hard to measure deep ocean temperatures and currents, so we don’t have that many observations.) Since these kinds of things are hard to predict exactly with a model, climatologists usually talk about long-term trends caused by external “forcing” (by things like CO2 emissions and variations in solar output), overprinted by random “natural variation”. The main difference between Roy Spencer and the rest of the climatologists is that he thinks that natural variation is important over much longer time periods, whereas the others generally think it’s mainly important over about a decade or less. For example, he complained in his book, , The Great Global Warming Blunder,

The IPCC has taken for granted that there are no natural variations in global average temperatures once one gets beyond a time scale of ten years or so. (p. 16)

The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does acknowledge that there is natural climate variability on a year-to-year basis, and maybe even decade-to-decade. After all, we have clear evidence that events like El Niño and La Niña cause some years to be warmer than others. Yet the IPCC refuses to accept that the global warming (or cooling) on time scales of thirty years or more can also be caused by Mother Nature. That, apparently, is humanity’s job. (p. 1)

In this latest article, however, Roy seems to be saying that the temperature should have kept going up pretty steeply because the external forcing from greenhouse gases has continued to rise. The problem is that this is true ONLY if you ignore natural variation that might temporarily offset the external forcing.

Spencer’s newfound suspicion of decadal-scale natural variations is unfounded. Foster and Rahmstorf (2011), for example, statistically removed the effects of El Niño/La Niña cycles, volcanoes, and solar variation, to produce the temperature evolution that WOULD HAVE occurred if these random, natural variations hadn’t happened. Here’s what they got (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1 Animated gif of the actual temperature record alternating with the one Foster and Rahmstorf produced after removing the signal from ENSO, solar variation, and volcanoes. Linked from the Skeptical Science website. Click on the image to go to the SkS article.

There is still random variation evident in Fig. 1, so we obviously haven’t removed all the noise, but the trend is much more consistently upward, including during the last decade. The fact is that natural variation can EASILY account for a leveling off of the temperature rise for a decade or so, and what’s more, even though climate models aren’t very good at predicting when these natural variations will occur, they do at least predict that they WILL happen (Santer et al., 2011).

The bottom line is that Roy Spencer has been arguing all along that natural variation can cause the temperature to go up or down for a while no matter what the external forcing is doing, and no matter how long the time period, but now he suddenly can’t imagine that this could happen over a single decade!

It’s also funny that Steve Milloy passed on Spencer’s assertions, but then just two days later he was promoting a paper in which Spencer argued that standard climate models are uncertain because “alternative hypotheses for the cause(s) of the warming, such as natural climate cycles or indirect forcing by the sun, have seen relatively little research.” (And of course, Roy cited his book, The Great Global Warming Blunder to support this point.) Milloy likes to label as “junk science” any science that leads to conclusions that might precipitate government regulations, but the fact is that he doesn’t have the expertise to understand the science he pans or the “alternative” science he promotes.

Funny he didn’t mention the extreme low solar activity over the last ten years.

Sorry if this is off topic, but there are other factors besides natural variation. Do you guys know what the deal is on the “cloud cover getting lower” which is supposed to increase OLR I think?
I have been seeing more articles on potential negative effects on warming one I haven’t heard much about is a paper out of Cornell about Aerosols having a longer term impact due to biological effects on them when they return to the ocean or land.

I took the Foster-Rahmstorf method and ran it for the coming year with reasonable estimates of solar and ENSO values (and assuming no volcanoes) – results are here – basically the final average temperature for 2012 should be around 0.1 degree warmer than 2011, or likely a bit more than that. Nothing spectacular, but possibly close to another record high.

You hardly ever see Spencer or others naming a prediction for the year like that, though I know Dana and the others at SkepticalScience have attempted to derive predictions from their statements of one sort or another. Can we pin him down that he really thinks it’s unlikely 2012 will be warmer than 2011? So far January was quite cool so you’d think it would be a safe bet for him…

Funny you mention it, I was thinking about doing a post predicting that 2013 will break the record, along similar lines. Given that we won’t even return to ENSO-neutral conditions until around May, I rather doubt 2012 will set a record, though I haven’t crunched the numbers yet as you have.

The ‘skeptics’ don’t like to put their money where their mouths are though (with a few exceptions, almost all of which have been proven wrong). In a recent presentation in the UK, Lindzen even said “…I avoid making forecasts for tenths of a degree change in globally averaged temperature anomaly…” (last slide)

I strongly recommend against making precise predictions: nothing to do with the science, more to do with psychology. Predictions are great if you get them right, and great fun when you’re among friends, but it’s too easy for sceptics to make hay with them if something unpredictable causes them to be wrong. It would be a millstone round your neck for ever more.

And we’re always telling those in denial that weather can’t be predicted; and let’s face it, the temperature in 2013 will only be weather.

Getting the prediction right won’t matter to denialists. They’ll just claim you got lucky, or that they have made the same prediction somewhere else, they’ll get the reference when they have the time, they just don’t have it to hand, and they’re busy, but they’ll get right back to you.

And if you’re right (within boundaries of error estimates), but not to the 4th decimal place, you’ll be wrong. If you put error bars on, that proves you’re not certain about your result. And if you don’t put error bars on, you’re not a scientist.

Bet with the governments.

Bet with the UN that if 2013 beats the world record, sanctions will be undertaken against ANY COUNTRY that doesn’t actually start reducing their CO2 emissions per GDP.

The governments aren’t listening, they’re pretending to listen by telling the scientists to prove some more.

The ordinary people need to see the proofs (RC and SkS and the Crocks series manage this for varying audiences fine), but I think it’s time for the science authorities to realise that they’re being gerrymandered and made irrelevant.

Stop making bets with deniers or newspapers, make bets with the governments. Say that you’ll bet legislation to reduce CO2 by 20% in 7 years that 2013 will break all records for global temperatures.

Nail the politicians to their mast and make them state clearly what they are doing with the work they’re paying their scientists for.

By: Wow on March 2, 2012 at 7:03 am

dana1981 it’s possible we could enter another La Nina this year and the inevitable El Nino will be put off another year. If that does happen then 2014 will be the warm year.

Predicting that 2013 will be a record warm year is effectively trying to predict ENSO.

Id feel better predicting that *either* 2013 or 2014 will break a new record.

Even then I am cautious about how strong the El Nino will be and also whether it will “align” with the calendar year. Id prefer to predict a record 12-month average period in the next two years.

I’d be even more comfortable with including 2015 in that prediction. If we don’t get a record by then, we’ll need to re-shuffle the thermometers and re-calibrate the satellites a tad. A tweak here, a tease there and voilà, .1 or .2 … we’re back in business.

I know Don Easterbrook has made predictions of immanent cooling. maybe since 2007. It doesn’t appear that the results have deterred him in his faith that ACC isn’t happening. Thee have been a few others.
I was rather impressed at Steve Goddard’s gall last year taunting “warmists” that 2011 was NOT the lowest ever recorded SIE. he also declined to bet because it was all about weather conditions. Of course in the spring he had lauded Bastardi’s prediction about a major recovery.

Milloy is a professional liar who started his career denying the dangers of second-hand smoke and never looked back. I’ve been debunking his stuff off and on since 2008 when he pushed a “poll” that was outright propaganda (and that’s a term I don’t use lightly).

I pointed out on his blog that the graph of forcing Spencer used (RCP6 at this page along with other projected forcings) showed no increase in forcing from 2002 until it was a tiny bit higher in 2010. Spencer didn’t realize that if temperature follows forcing, then it shouldn’t have risen since 2002 until quite recently (ignoring La Nina. Including La Nina it shouldn’t be higher than 2002.)

I looked through RCP6 and the strongest fall in forcing since 2002 is caused by volcanic aerosols. This supports Foster and Rahmstorf’s analysis.

The thermal inertia of the system is mainly in the form of ocean heat storage as far as I’m aware so to cause an increase in temperature, the heat absorption by the oceans would have to decrease over this time. This would imply a significant warming of a large enough part of the oceans over this time but we know that the vast majority of the depths of the oceans have not warmed much compared with the surface.

Thus the “inertia” argument depends on the oceans not being very good at transporting heat away from the surface. Are the oceans poor enough at transporting heat from the surface to allow surface warming when there’s no increased forcing at the surface?

Suppose you suddenly spiked the GHG concentrations in the atmosphere. That would instantaneously change the energy outflow so that the system would be out of equilibrium (more energy coming in than going out.) The surface would eventually heat up, but it would take a while because the top 100 m or so of the ocean. So if the system is out of equilibrium (and it is), and then you plateau the forcing for a few years the temperature will keep going up for a while. How long of a while? It depends on the thickness of the mixed layer and how much heat is being shuffled down to the deep ocean.

Anyway, I was going to make the same argument you did, but then I ran the RCP-6 forcings through a 0-D climate model to check, and it turned out the inertia would be enough to mask such a short hiatus in forcing, even with a pretty shallow mixed layer.

The oceans are not just a pure inertia in contact with the atmosphere. They are a mixture of inertia and resistance down into the depths and could be modelled like an electrical resistance-capacitance transmission line, with the deep oceans represented by an enormous capacitance linked to shallower water with some amount of resistance. Thus only a small fraction of the oceans mass is an inertia that is involved in short-term variations in the surface temperature. The vast majority just provides a steady heat-sink that slowly responds to rising surface temperature.

Another way to study the situation is to look at how ocean surface temperatures have responded since 2002. Ocean surface temperature has not risen since 2002 but if there was significant inertia directly involved in that temperature then ocean surface temperature would have continued rising. The bottom line is I’m saying the vast majority of the oceans inertia is hidden behind varying amounts of resistance to heat transfer.

” … the top 2.5 m of the ocean holds as much heat as the entire atmosphere above it. Thus the heat required to change a mixed layer of 25 m by 1 °C would be sufficient to raise the temperature of the atmosphere by 10 °C.”

The average depth of the ocean is 3,790 m.

It doesn’t take much ocean to provide a lot of inertia.

By: riverat (Dave) on March 2, 2012 at 1:55 am

Everyone should know just how dynamic and complex the climate is and all of the factors that affect it. Here are some sites to look into, if you care to. The biggest flows out of the atmosphere are photosynthesis on land and CO2 uptake by cold ocean water. These are about 30 times and 40 times respectively the flow of carbon into the atmosphere from fossil fuel burning.

“It is thought that the carbon dioxide in the sea exists in equilibrium with that of exposed rock and bottom sediment containing limestone CaCO3 (or sea shells for that matter). In other words, that the element calcium exists in equilibrium with CO3.http://www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/global/acid.htm

“The oceans are THOUGHT [my emphases] to have absorbed about half of the extra CO2 put into the atmosphere in the industrial age .

Compared with the atmosphere but not compared with the earth’s thermal imbalance. The depth of ocean required to absorb the 0.65 W/(m2 of earths surface) that the oceans absorb from global warming energy imbalance is equivalent to uniformly warming the oceans at the same rate as the surface to a depth of 400-500 metres. This means most of the energy imbalance is going into the ocean below the mixed layer so the inertia in direct contact with the atmosphere is relatively small.

“The oceans are not just a pure inertia in contact with the atmosphere. They are a mixture of inertia and resistance down into the depths and could be modelled like an electrical resistance-capacitance transmission line, with the deep oceans represented by an enormous capacitance linked to shallower water with some amount of resistance. Thus only a small fraction of the oceans mass is an inertia that is involved in short-term variations in the surface temperature. The vast majority just provides a steady heat-sink that slowly responds to rising surface temperature.”

Yes, finally someone else who fundamentally understands this. The amount of seasonal ocean surface temperature change that occurs in just 6 months time in each hemisphere suggests the amount of ocean water buffering the climate to changes in forcing is far smaller than most people realize. This means changes in forcing, including GHG ‘forcing’, are effected relatively quickly.

If this were not the case, there would be very little seasonal change and virtually no difference at all between night and day (at least over the oceans).

This all depends on mixing timescales. That is, maybe the top couple meters doesn’t mix much with the water below over a couple days, but it mixes a lot over longer periods. If the top 100 m isn’t mixing pretty well, then why is the temperature pretty constant all the way down to that depth? Try making a heat diffusion (no advection) model that produces such a profile, and maybe I’ll take this seriously.

Only a fraction (25% perhaps) of the ocean’s heat absorption is going into the top 100 m of ocean. So only a similar fraction would be apparent in thermal inertia at the surface, i.e. only a similar fraction would appear at the surface during times of no increase in forcing.

Of course, transport of heat into the deep oceans must be occurring mainly by a process other than thermal conduction because the thermal conductivity of water is only 0.6 W/m/K. So even a thermal gradient of 1K over just 1 metre is not enough to transport the heat the oceans are absorbing.

He is basically saying the data is too weak for CAGW to justify doing anything substantial about it yet. Given my physics/business background, I tend to agree. What points might you agree with? Where do you disagree?

[small summary excerpt]

…….. “The latter is the story that is being widely told, to keep people from losing faith in a theory that isn’t working — so far — the way that it should. And I have only one objection to that. Keep your hands off of my money while the theory is still unproven and not in terribly good agreement with reality!

Well, I have other objections as well — open up the debate, acknowledge the uncertainties, welcome contradictory theories, stop believing in a set of theoretical results as if climate science is some sort of religion… but we can start with shit-canning the IPCC and the entire complex arrangement of “remedies” to a problem that may well be completely ignorable and utterly destined to take care of itself long before it ever becomes a real problem ….”

As JMurphy pointed out, Brown’s language about what mainstream climate scientists think is a bit hyperbolic.

The rest is pretty standard hand-waving about how science doesn’t produce absolute Truth, and we don’t know everything so we don’t know anything. What I don’t see is any substantial attempt on his part to determine what the data we have is good enough for.

“They are certain when they predict that this warming will continue until a global catastrophe occurs that will kill billions of people unless we act in certain ways now to prevent it.”

Is this not a fair comment about what Dr. James Hansen et al think? Don’t those in favor of “cap and trade”, mandates, and carbon taxes think this?

What do you think? Do you believe in CAGW or just AGW?

2) “What I don’t see is any substantial attempt on his part to determine what the data we have is good enough for.”

Fair question. He does say he would not be willing to spend large $$ on alternative energy deployment until the CAGW models/theories show better predictive power. He might support (I’m guessing) lower budget items like:

Given my chemistry, climate science, and general ability to tell when people are talking out of their area of expertise, I disagree with Dr. Robert Brown. Let me take a few quotes:

“Yet I was — and continue to be — at least willing to entertain the possibility that I might have to chuck the whole damn thing, wrong from top to bottom — all because a silly neutrino in Europe seems to be moving faster than it should ever be aver to move. ”

This guy goes back and forth between noting (correctly) that some theories only hold over certain ranges, and that for high speeds or masses Newton’s Laws need to be corrected, and that gravity and relativity have issues at very very small scales… and then completely blowing it by claiming that a single neutrino experiment, no matter how well documented, would be a reason to “chuck the whole damn thing”. First: he doesn’t apply proper skepticism to experimental results that contradict theory – by far the most likely outcome of the neutrino experiment was finding out that something was wrong (like a cable!). Second, even if the neutrino had moved faster than light… relativity still explains a lot, we’d probably only need to adjust it at the extremes, much like relativity slightly modified Newton’s Laws.

“In the end, nobody really knows the global average temperature of the Earth’s surface in 2011 within less than around 1K. If anybody claims to, they are full of shit.”

The guy sort of walks this claim back by indirectly maybe referring to the possibility that anomaly measurements could be more accurate than determining an actual surface temperature. Of course, since anomalies are all that anyone in the field talks about, this just shows Brown’s ignorance of what is important, and what can be calculated. Who is full of what, here?

“Such a comparison fails. It actually fails way back in the twentieth century, where it fails to predict or explain the cooling from 1945 to roughly 1965-1970. ”

Well… does it? Most models seem to do a decent job of capturing the 20th century, based on a combination of aerosol cooling, volcanic eruptions, solar changes, and GHGs. He’s claiming a failure of explanation where no such failure exists. (if he wants to claim that he doesn’t believe the explanations, well, he should do so. With specifics.)

“but we can start with shit-canning the IPCC ”

Really? So, this guy obviously likes profanity, but he also apparently doesn’t realize that the role of the IPCC is assessing the science, not implementing the solutions.

“No matter what, we will be producing far less CO_2 in 30 years than we are today. Sheer economics and the advance of physics and technology and engineering will make fossil-fuel burning electrical generators as obsolete as steam trains. ”

And I love it – after a whole screed about how we should remember that science is uncertain, and that we should believe in anything absolutely, this lecturer of physics claims to be able to predict economics and technological development so that “no matter what”!!! we’ll see “far less” CO2 emissions in 30 years. I wonder if he’d be willing to make a bet on that? I could use some funding for my retirement…

“Yet the IPCC refuses to accept that the global warming (or cooling) on time scales of thirty years or more can also be caused by Mother Nature.
…The IPCC has taken for granted that there are no natural variations in global average temperatures once one gets beyond a time scale of ten years or so.”

I think Dr. Spencer might need to learn the difference between “refusing to acknowledge” something and “having no good evidence” that something is real. Perhaps the IPCC “has taken for granted” that natural variability has little to no impact on longer timescales because there isn’t any reason in the literature to assume otherwise, and their process merely reflects that reality.
The IPCC can’t very well take into account the vague notion of unquantified long-term noise that hasn’t been established to exist at all. Given the lack of support for such things in the literature, even if we take Spencer’s papers at face value, it’s unlikely that his conclusions would be well-vetted, tested, and supported enough to make it into the IPCC’s considerations. As I understand it these kind of things that are inconsistent with the existing literature would need more than one or two papers to be considered strong enough evidence. Spencer himself said that such alternatives have received relatively little research.
Even if Spencer thinks he has uncovered such long-term natural variability (and so far it doesn’t seem likely), it’s not a fair criticism because his papers claiming it were first published after the last IPCC report. I think that counts as missing the deadline for inclusion. What exactly does he expect the IPCC to do? Invent a time machine to include papers published after their report, and credulously promote the very little bit of his research that claims to have found something to the status of other, better-supported conclusions that say the opposite?

Just made a post over at Roy’s blog and spotted this priceless gem. There really are some opinionated ignorant people out there:

“The physical principle behind the analysis lies in the Kirchhoff’s law of 19th century radiation physics, which can be restated in plain English as: an object that absorbs emits and an object that emits absorbs. Absorption and emission are two inseparable equivalent identities of the same physical essence. Carbon dioxide absorbs infrared therefore it emits as well thermal radiation. Nitrogen and oxygen do not absorb, THEREFORE DO NOT EMIT(my emphasis). CO2 approaches 0 K because of its emission if there is no radiation source; absorption of the thermal radiation from the earth ground surface rises CO2 temperature from -273.15°C to -78°C only. CO2 gains heat by colliding with warmer nitrogen and oxygen to rise its temperature further, which can be measured by spectroscopy. ”

I see your starting point on the graph is in the late 70’s, when we all can agree, the start of 2 decades of warming began.
There are many different time frames to pick in order to do a temperature analysis. Thermometer records go back well over 100 years. What are the odds of this graph coincidentally having the same starting point that would maximizes the upward slope of temperature increases?

I trade commodities using technical analysis and weather(meteorologist).
I say your starting point clearly displays a bias.

All of us, including myself and Roy Spencer have bias’s. It’s part of being a human being. Our brains are loaded with assumptions, perceptions and what we have stored as knowledge based on our understanding of the world and our experiences.

The biggest deterrent to learning new things, is having assumptions about what we know already that create bias. The higher our confidence is about something, the harder it is to learn new things.

Our brains will subconsciously embrace information that supports what we already think we know and reject that which is new if it contradicts.

Commodity traders don’t last long if they can’t recognize bias. When a trader is wrong, not acknowledging it pronto and not embracing new information that contradicts what you thought you knew, will wipe out your equity fast.

You sir, are clearly biased and it was obvious well before seeing the temperature graph you presented.

I know that Dr. Robert B. Laughlin has a much better understanding of this topic than you could ever hope to acquire from where ever you get your delusional information.
“Please remain calm: The Earth will heal itself — Climate is beyond our power to control…Earth doesn’t care about governments or their legislation. You can’t find much actual global warming in present-day weather observations. Climate change is a matter of geologic time, something that the earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself.” — Nobel Prize-Winning Stanford University Physicist Dr. Robert B. Laughlin, who won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1998, and was formerly a research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/05/the-2011-climate-b-s-of-the-year-awards/

Please supply a list of your alarmist buddies that have won a Nobel Prize in Science.

Here are the thoughts of just a few scientist plus Bert Rutan’s views on this subject:
“I am ashamed of what climate science has become today.” The science “community is relying on an inadequate model to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming in order to generate funding and to gain attention. If this is what ‘science’ has become today, I, as a scientist, am ashamed.” — Research Chemist William C. Gilbert published a study in August 2010 in the journal Energy & Environment titled “The thermodynamic relationship between surface temperature and water vapor concentration in the troposphere” and he published a paper in August 2009 titled “Atmospheric Temperature Distribution in a Gravitational Field.”

“The dysfunctional nature of the climate sciences is nothing short of a scandal. Science is too important for our society to be misused in the way it has been done within the Climate Science Community.” The global warming establishment “has actively suppressed research results presented by researchers that do not comply with the dogma of the IPCC.” — Swedish Climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University.

“Those who call themselves ‘Green planet advocates’ should be arguing for a CO2- fertilized atmosphere, not a CO2-starved atmosphere…Diversity increases when the planet was warm AND had high CO2 atmospheric content…Al Gore’s personal behavior supports a green planet – his enormous energy use with his 4 homes and his bizjet, does indeed help make the planet greener. Kudos, Al for doing your part to save the planet.” — Renowned engineer and aviation/space pioneer Burt Rutan, who was named “100 most influential people in the world, 2004″ by Time Magazine and Newsweek called him “the man responsible for more innovations in modern aviation than any living engineer.”

“Global warming is the central tenet of this new belief system in much the same way that the Resurrection is the central tenet of Christianity. Al Gore has taken a role corresponding to that of St Paul in proselytizing the new faith…My skepticism about AGW arises from the fact that as a physicist who has worked in closely related areas, I know how poor the underlying science is. In effect the scientific method has been abandoned in this field.” — Atmospheric Physicist Dr. John Reid, who worked with Australia’s CSIRO’s (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization) Division of Oceanography and worked in surface gravity waves (ocean waves) research.

Mr. Swallow, your comment is full of the sort of rhetoric that stupid, intellectually dishonest people use, and that intelligent, intellectually honest people don’t use. It might be useful for making yourself feel good but it won’t sway anyone.

Mr. diminution, or what ever your name is. On that point; if you actually believed what you write you would use your real name and not some bit of nonsense like “diminution”. Now to the point, you sound like one of the typical delusional, far left anthropogenic global warming fools who see their hypotheses crashing down around their ears every day now . I begin with a comment made by Barry Bickmore: “These climate oscillations depend on complicated stuff like deep ocean currents that are hard to predict, given that we don’t have that many observations of what the state of the system is like at any given time. (In other words, it’s expensive and hard to measure deep ocean temperatures and currents, so we don’t have that many observations.)” He says this after those of his persuasion are now claiming that the missing heat is in the oceans and of all things in the polar region’s.

“The December Southern Hemisphere sea ice extent was 12.63 million square km (4.88 million square miles), which was 1.36 million square km (530,000 square miles), or 12.1 percent, above the 1981-2010 average. This ranked as the second largest December Antarctic sea ice extent on record….”http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/global-snow/2013/12

Why would you need to clarify a four line post if you were intelligent and intellectually honest? You prove that there are very few limits for some people, to include the one who will not use their real name because they do not want people to know just how shallow and unprincipled they are, for their level of stupidity. Because you are not bright enough to even know what the issues are let alone comment on them, I present this information to you to keep this on track.
“So let’s maybe take a look at the importance of that “alarming” 400 parts-per-million atmospheric CO2 concentration we keep hearing about. As Steven Goddard summarized some results in an August 10 article he posted on Real Science, we are currently witnessing:

* Coldest summer on record at the North Pole

* Highest August Arctic ice extent since 2006

* Record high August Antarctic ice extent

* No major hurricane strikes for eight years

* Slowest tornado season on record

* No global warming for 17 years

* Second slowest fire season on record

* Four of the five snowiest northern hemisphere winters have occurred since 2000

Regarding those pending IPCC predictions that sea levels will accelerate, don’t plan to sell your beach front property any time soon, at least not for that reason. William Happer, a Princeton physics professor who has researched ocean physics for the U.S. Air Force, notes that, “The sea level has been rising since 1800, at the end of the Little Ice Age.” Isn’t that to be expected? In fact even the IPCC admitted in its most recent report that “no long-term acceleration of sea level has been identified using 20th-century data alone.”

Dr. Nils-Axel Morner, the former chair of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, has been studying sea level and its effects on coastal areas for more than 35 years. He observes that “…sea level was indeed rising from, let us say, 1850 to 1930-40. And that rise had a rate in the order of 1 millimeter per year.”

Morner is very critical of the IPCC and its headline-grabbing doomsday predictions. He scorns the IPCC’s claim to “know” the facts about sea level rise, noting that real scientists “are searching for the answer” by continuing to collect data “because we are field geologists; they are computer scientists. So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don’t find it!”http://www.cfact.org/2013/08/22/as-real-temperatures-subside-the-ipcc-heats-up-the-fight/

This is the last time that I reply to such a disingenuous fool who tries to pettifog something that is a mystery to him already.

Your previous comment that, quote, “…the missing heat is in the oceans and of all things in the polar region’s…” clearly shows that you don’t understand the difference between temperature (a simple measure) and heat (a form of energy). Large masses (like the polar regions in total) that rise in temperature by only a small amount and yet still remain very cold, can, and do, store many times more energy than things of smaller mass that rise in temperature by a larger amount (like the rest the planet’s atmosphere in tropical and temperate regions).

Most denial and scepticism regarding climate is based on misunderstandings of physics.

Johnrussell40: Just how sure are you of all of your conjecture that you have put forth and this all that it is. If these polar regions are “storing” this heat then why is it not reflected in the satellite temperature readings?
This kind of back peddling reminds me of a quote that Mark Twain is credit with.
“There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such trifling investment of facts.” Mark Twain

“Victoria Lower Glacier, Ross Sea Region of Antarctica
This work revealed three climatically-distinct time periods: the last 150 years of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP, AD 1140 to 1287), the Little Ice Age (LIA, AD 1288 to 1807), and the Modern Era (ME, AD 1808 to 2000). Although the authors report that “the final 150 yrs of the MWP were … about 0.35 °C warmer than the ME,” http://www.co2science.org/data/mwp/studies/l2_victoriaglacier.php

I assume that you do not believe that the Vikings lived on Greenland and carried out agriculture to sustain themselves where today it would be impossible to do.
“The Norse arrived in Greenland 1,000 years ago and became very well established,” says Schweger, describing the Viking farms and settlements that crowded the southeast and southwest coasts of Greenland for almost 400 years.
“The Greenland settlements were the most distant of all European medieval sites in the world,” said Schweger. “Then the Norse disappear, and the question has always been: what happened?”http://www.folio.ualberta.ca/38/16/03.html
Please note that the above links are not for a bogus site such as Skeptical Sciences but for site that actually know something.

What do you think your hidden temperatures were in the arctic when this occurred, and occur it did.
“The Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the water too hot, according to a report to the Commerce Department yesterday from Consul Ifft, at Bergen, Norway. Reports from fishermen, seal hunters and explorers, he declared, all point to a radical change in climate conditions and hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the Arctic zone.
“The source report of the Washington Post article on changes in the arctic has been found in the Monthly Weather Review for November 1922. It is much more detailed than the Washington Post (Associated Press) article. It seems the AP heaviliy relied on the report from Norway Consulate George Ifft, which is shown below. See the original MWR article below and click the newsprint copy for a complete artice or see the link to the original PDF below:”http://www.sott.net/articles/show/200389-Flashback-1922-Extra-Extra-Read-all-about-it-Arctic-Ocean-Getting-Warm-Seals-Perish-Glaciers-and-Icebergs-Melt-

[…] he has done that before. Here is a critique of Spencer's past work by the Professor at U of Utah. Roy Spencer’s Junk Science | Climate Asylum The bottom line is that Roy Spencer has been arguing all along that natural variation can […]